Gartner has highlighted the top 10 technology trends and drivers that will be strategic for Indian organizations in 2014

Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major financial investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or has become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. These technologies can impact an organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives.

Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics: BI, analytics and performance management segment is the hottest software market in India, fueled by IT prioritization and expanding business buying centers. A competitive business environment and economic conditions are also forcing enterprises in India to focus on using fact based decision-making tools to rationalize costs and time for businesses. Enterprises in India will continue to use BI to be transformative in their approach.

Mobility Solutions: Mobility in enterprise has created a huge opportunity for IT leaders to reduce costs, increase productivity and enable smooth business transactions. Swift growth in the prevalence of mobile devices, a decline in their price, and falling data plan costs have the potential to completely transform some business models. Organizations in India are beginning to leverage more personal interactions with greater reach and are also looking to evaluate mobile platforms as a delivery mechanism to provide an integrated view of multiple proprietary and publicly available datasets to help drive better real-time decisions.

Cloud Computing: Although still in its infancy in India and other emerging markets, cloud adoption is increasing. Led by infrastructure-as-a-service engagements in the data center, disaster recovery and storage areas, there is a broad range of providers that target large organizations as well as SMBs. This fast growing adoption by a diverse range of organizations has catalyzed providers to invest in high quality data centers and innovative cloud infrastructures, as well as a portfolio of cloud-related offerings such as security, communications and managed services.

Social Media and Computing: Social media in India has seen exponential growth in the recent past with enterprises using it for customer support and customers using it to offer opinions. A growing number of enterprises used social media to connect with their customers and for marketing campaigns in 2013 and social media is playing a pivotal role in Indian politics with the government and political parties increasingly using it to connect with citizens. Much of this growth can be attributed to increasing Internet penetration – which reached 198 million users (including mobile) as of June 2013 – making India one of the three most connected countries in the world.

Machine to Machine (M2M): The M2M market in India is in a nascent stage but growing rapidly. Indian enterprises driven by demands to improve agility and productivity are evaluating the use of M2M-enabled solutions. Among the early adopters are verticals like utilities, automotive, financial services and transport, with other like healthcare and manufacturing following closely. The success of these projects is expected to result in broad-based deployments of M2M as an integral component of workflow automation.

Hosted Virtual Desktop (HVD): In India, server-based computing, which is also referred as “hosted shared desktop” or “terminal services,” is seeing more adoption. More than 80 percent of desktop virtualization implementations are based on HVD. Organizations are only looking at desktop virtualization from the point of cost requirement, and they overlook other benefits such as full data backup, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) support, extended hardware life cycles, security, compliance and anytime-anywhere access.

Personal Cloud: Adoption of cloud computing in India is currently limited to the private cloud. Organizations are focused on protecting their applications located in enterprise app stores, as well as the content on employees’ personal devices used at work. Tablets are becoming the first-choice user device and this form factor’s explosion is creating device ubiquity. Users are creating their own personal digital ecosystems with their own sets of apps, games and media. Content is starting to shift to the cloud but, in the future, the cloud will become the primary storage for personal content, and local versions of the content will exist only as staged or cached elements.

The Internet of Things (IoT): In its early phase of development, enterprises are experimenting with the IoT across a range of sectors, applications, business models and technologies in an attempt to unlock its value. The IoT delivers tangible value to enterprises through the ability to better utilize remote assets and creates business cases in three key areas – operational technology (OT), digital supply chain and customer interaction.

3D Printing: In India interest levels in 3D printing are slowly picking up and this is reflected in the increased presence of providers in the 3D printing space. Because of the country’s large population base, high volumes and low cost requirements, 3D printing is expected to take off rapidly and revolutionize industries as diverse as aerospace, consumer goods, healthcare, retail, manufacturing and the military. 3D printing has the potential to radically transform design, manufacturing and the supply chain model in India.